Endure the Dark
by ZScalantian
Summary: It is possible to survive in the Darkness, Aqua has found. Not comfortable, not easy, never safe. But possible.


It is possible to survive in the Darkness, Aqua has found. Not comfortable, not easy, never safe. But possible.

Master Eraqus told she and Terra that, a long time ago, the day he explained the Realms to them. They were full of questions about the Realm of Light, where their own worlds were, and still more eager to know about the Realm Between, where their new home stood on neutral ground. Fascinated and repulsed, they even asked about the Realm of Darkness.

The Master had never been there, but his own Master had, and his fellow apprentice. If their teacher's face clouded when he spoke of his old classmate, she didn't notice back then. He told them that very rarely, a Keybearer had a quest that forced them to enter the Dark Realm. It was a very dangerous place to be, and the quester would find themselves attacked by constant waves of Heartless attracted to the keyblade. There was a more insidious enemy as well - the Darkness was an entity on its own. That curdling, corruptive force would try to crack open the quester's heart and slip inside. It was not wise to spend very long there, no matter how desperate the errand.

Aqua has spent a very long time here. She can't keep track of how long. There's no way to tell time here. At the start, her own body's rhythms helped her, but she's lost all sense now. There's a moon sometimes, a crescent fingernail that does not wax or wane, and casts only a corpselight. There's a pale, milky sun that appears inconstantly and is no brighter than a moon in the Realm of Light.

There are no stars here, either. She wonders, peering up at it, why the Realm of Light is so full of worlds, countless stars in the sky, when the Realm of Darkness is only one world, but as big as all the Light worlds combined. Usually, the sky here is mottled, purple and red, with jags of black lightning frozen permanently across it. Sometimes, black storm clouds roil up there. At the sea's end, the only real water she's found here, there's what looks like a real sky, grey and clouded, perpetually night.

She misses sunlight. She is always cold here, but more than the warmth, she misses _color_. Everything in the Realm of Darkness is in muted shades of grey, blue, purple, red. The boldest color she sees are the yellow eyes of the Heartless, winking at her from shadows.

She misses sound. The air here is always still, and nothing lives in the Darkness except the Heartless. She talks and sings aloud, just to be hearing _something_.

She misses sleep more than almost anything else. Sometimes, she misses it more than her friends. It's horrible to admit, but there is no room here for lying to herself. If she was given the choice between having Ven and Terra back, and whole, and having eight hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep… She'd pick her friends, _of course_ she would, but it would be a harder decision than she is comfortable with.

It is not safe to sleep here. She manages to doze, erecting a dozen shining, faceted barriers around herself, curled by a pillar of stone so at least her back is guarded. Usually it's after a battle with some large Heartless, when she is too exhausted to keep going, hopefully before the smaller ones begin to intrude on the defeated one's territory. She does not know how many times she's snapped awake, the Master's keyblade in her hand without her consciously calling it, just as the last of her barriers came down, scratched to ribbons by the Shadows' long black claws.

More dangerous than the threat of Heartless is the Darkness itself. It's bad enough when she is awake. It collects under her nails, gathers at the corners of her eyes, black and gummy. The air here stinks of it, cool and sharp and rich and rotten, and she never gets used to the scent. It is at its worst when she's drifting off. Then she can _hear_ it, a sweet seductive whisper, like waves on the shore, rain falling on soft sand. Good sounds, sounds she likes, and her tired mind leans towards it unconsciously before she jerks herself awake.

She does not think it has infected her heart. She would know, she thinks. But then, she did not know it was in Terra's heart until it was too late. ( _Was it really a bad thing?_ she wonders. _Master, darkness is in every heart. Wasn't the darkness in Terra's just as much a part of him as the light? Didn't the problem come from how he was ashamed of it, and angry about it, and how those emotions got all twisted up with the dark itself, until nothing good could come out of it?_ ) And then her eyes will snap open and she hadn't realized they were closed, and she will wonder whether those were her own thoughts or the whispers of the Dark around her.

It is possible to survive here. There is water, a cold, clear stream that runs into the ocean on the dark margin. There are tiny silvery fish, the size of her finger, that swim offshore, and she nets them with magic. Black seaweed floats in sometimes, and is, if not enjoyable, edible when roasted. There are dark purple berries that grow infrequently along the sandy coast. The first time she tries one, she prays to everything good and Light in the worlds that it is not poisonous, and has an esuna spell readied in her hand if it is. It gives her cramps, but it doesn't kill her, and she'll take what she can get.

Aqua keeps herself on task, focused. She treats the beach as a base camp, a supply center. There's fewer heartless there, and she could stay there permanently if she wished. She doesn't wish. She's got to find a way forward. Once she's given up on sleep for another few hours or days, she plans her next moves like a campaign. Here is where she cached some supplies, she should replenish them soon, here is where a giant heartless lurks, maybe she should clear it out today, here were the fragmented walls of a cottage from some world swallowed by the darkness, she should check to see whether it's still there. They're all tasks she sets to give herself the illusion of progress while she treads water on her real goal.

She's looking for some way out of here. She can't transform the Master's keyblade, and she lost the ability to slip into the lanes between worlds when she sent her own keyblade away with Terra. She knows there is a way to use Darkness to open a portal, but she cannot risk the danger of experimenting. She finds footsteps sometimes, in the pale soil, and follows them until they go too far from the dark margin or they vanish in a swirl of disturbed earth. Someone else visits the beach, she knows, because she finds the ruins of their campfires. She leaves messages written in the sand, sends lightning and fire into the sky as a signal.

Sometimes she swears she hears someone shouting in the distance. Once, she stumbles over a strip of white fabric half-buried in the sand, with the words 'I'll get back' written on it in what looks and feels distressingly like dried blood.

Aqua finds dark passages sometimes, corridors across the sand, their twisting black walls moving like snakes. She attacks them, trying to break her way into someone else's gateway between worlds. It never works, but she never stops trying.

She doesn't think about losing her armor, her own keyblade. She ignores all bitter memories - the twisted remnants of the Land of Departure, the Master's death, Ven asleep in an empty room, Terra white-haired and golden-eyed and cruel. Those thoughts give the Darkness an opening, and she can't afford that. She clutches her wayfinder, thinks about Terra' and Ven's keyblades coming to her rescue when she'd given up. She thinks about Snow White waking from her cursed sleep, Prince Phillip battling through thorns to reach his love, 626's determination to be free and make friends of his own. She takes heart from memories of Zack's boldness, Queen Minnie's kindness, the good advice of the Fairy Godmother.

She casts a spell on herself, thinking of the sweet-scented flowers Kairi gave her. It's the same enchantment she put on the little girl, a variation on the one she charmed the wayfinders with. To pierce through Darkness and the Lanes Between, to always come through safe to Light again, to connect your heart to the ones you're meant to be with. She writes it on her skin as often as she remembers, a prayer pouring down her fingers in tingles of light.

In the meantime, she survives.


End file.
